Cloud computing may have settled in as a permanent fixture of the enterprise technology landscape, but the chase for the next big thing is not over by any stretch. The hot new technology making headlines today is containerization, which the industry appears to be embracing even faster than the everything-as-a-service mindset.

Cisco Systems Inc. became the latest big-name vendor to endorse buzzed-about Docker container engine last week after Kenneth Owens, the chief technology officer for its cloud business, revealed that his firm apparently intends to provide support for the project sometime next year. He didn’t offer much in the way of details but indicated that the move is part of  the switching and routing giant’s multibillion-dollar plan to establish a federated network of data centers that will provide interoperable services to customers worldwide. The platform-agnostic nature of containers makes Docker a viable option with that vision.

Another top trend that has been keeping cloud vendors busy this past week is analytics, which Box Inc. made an especially big priority at its close-knit customer conference in San Francisco. The company introduced a new technology called Workflow that groups documents according to properties such as type, file and legal classification and enables admins to create policies for handling files based on those criteria. Invoices, for example, can be automatically sent to the financial department’s folder leveraging the software.

FireEye Inc. is also injecting more analytics into the public cloud with a new release of its Threat Analytics Platform (TAP) unveiled on Wesdensday that provides interagtion with Amazon.com Inc’s market leading infrastructure-as-a-service platform. According to the security vendor, the upgrade enables users to combine data about their cloud deployments with logs from on-premise infrastructure into a complete view of their environments. That visibility can make it easier to spot composite attacks that exploit multiple vulnerabilities throughout the network, FireEye claims.

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